News
Exciting things are always afoot.
Congratulations Alex Acosta on UROP award!
Alex Acosta has received an award through UROP to pursue an original research project on polarity particles. Specifically, he will be investigating cases where "yeah" and "no" co-occur, as in: "Yeah no, I agree".
Anastasiia Tatlubaeva receives UROP award
Anastasiia Tatlubaeva received a UROP award for Fall 2019! She will be studying superlatives in Slavic, especially the morphosyntax of universal standards in superlative constructions in Russian (vsekh vs. vsego).
Danielle Dionne to give LSA talk in New Orleans, January 2020
Danielle Dionne and Elizabeth Coppock submitted an abstract for the Linguistic Society of America's Annual Meeting in New Orleans, January 2020 and it was ACCEPTED as a TALK! Go us! We will be presenting in the Experimental Pragmatics session on Sunday January 5th, 11am-12:30pm.
The title of our talk is: "Cross-linguistic pragmatic differences as a function of hyponym complexity".
Paper published in “Definiteness Across Languages”!
A paper by Elizabeth Coppock, entitled "Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most", has just appeared in a volume entitled Definiteness Across Languages, published by Language Science Press.
Posters presented at CUNY, XPRAG and XPRAG-ADJ
Joint experimental work with Helena Aparicio on the pragmatics and processing of Haddock Descriptions containing gradable modifiers (e.g. "the rabbit in the big/bigger hat") was presented at three venues recently:
- the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference
- XPRAG
- XPRAG-ADJ
First European tour of the summer successful!
Elizabeth Coppock has just returned from Potsdam, Germany where she gave a keynote address at the International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian concerning object agreement.
Prior to that, she was in Utrecht for a dissertation defense, where she presented new experimental results on modified numerals.
Collaborative CS/linguistics project underway!
The Hariri Computing Institute has generously granted seed funding to start a project entitled "Bridging linguistic and visual knowledge through Visual Genome". The PIs are Elizabeth Coppock (Linguistics) and Derry Wijaya (Computer Science). Three students will be working on the project this summer:
- Danielle Dionne, Linguistics Ph.D. student
- Elias Ganem, BA in Linguistics '19
- Nathanial Graham, rising junior in International Relations (and linguistics genius)
As a first step, we aim to apply Rational Speech Acts models of referring expression generation to the Visual Genome corpus. Wish us luck!
Two talks at Sorting Out Definiteness in Bremen!
We presented two talks at the DGfS Sorting Out Definiteness workshop, held March 6-8 in Bremen.
- Elizabeth Coppock presented a keynote address on definite comparatives
- Miriam Yifrach and Elizabeth Coppock presented joint work on the syntax and semantics of the definiteness markers in Turoyo, based on Miriam's fieldwork carried out over the summer of 2018.
Pamela Sugrue presents her research in Sweden!
LiSLab undergraduate Pamela Sugrue did us proud this December, presenting her work at a workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden entitled "Fieldwork: Methods and Theory", held at the University of Gothenburg 13-14 December, 2018. Her talk, entitled "A method for detecting superlative interpretations of positive adjectives", addresses what to make of the situation where, in a fieldwork setting, the consultant translates superlative-form adjectives using positive-form predicates. Does this mean that the positive form has a superlative interpretation, as Vera Hohaus argued for Samoan? Pamela's fieldwork showed that Swahili does not pattern like Samoan, where positive forms have a superlative interpretation, and went further to establish that the positive form is not even ambiguous between a positive interpretation and a superlative one, building on experimental literature on scale structure.
The talk was very well-received and she acquired a new "Swedish mother", her host, shown in the picture.
Two fall UROP awards!
LiSLab is excited to welcome Varun Malikayil, a Junior in Computer Engineering, and Pamela Sugrue, senior in Linguistics, who have both won UROP awards for fall 2018! Varun will be working on an eye-tracking study involving complex noun phrases, and Pamela will be working on experimental and field methods for studying gradable adjectives.
Congrats and welcome, Varun and Pamela!